Big news in the atheist community. A new species of ape has been discovered. A phylogenetic study has just concluded that this kind of orang-utan speciated 700,000 years ago whereas the other two species of orang-utan separated from each other 400,000 years ago. Modern humans at that time were all one big happy family, and still pretty much in Africa, it is supposed.

Welcome to this new species, congratulations on being discovered, and what a wonderful thing evolution is that we see it going on around us all the time, with whole new species appearing again and again despite what these religious nutjobs tell us.

Happily thanks to this discovery, science has once again allowed us to pat ourselves on the backs and reassure ourselves that we can explain fully how this world came into being and even if there are loads of unanswered questions and uncertaintoes, one thing we can be absolutely sure of, God and the Bible had nothing whatsoever to do with it!

The roman catholic church in Uzhhorod (Ukraine) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Given the selection of a new Pope, the Roman Catholic Church is much discussed in the media and on blogs. Here is a random comment I replied to today in one place. It is a comment I can partly assent to, but rather more needed to be said:

Anglicans ARE Catholic. In fact, many of us secretly believe we are more Catholic than the Romans, though we’re usually tactful enough to mention this to them. And of course, we are ALL, Roman and English, “under Christ” in an ultimate sense – the question at issue is merely the more mundane one of how exactly one goes about delegating Christ’s authority on a day-to-day level.

My response was as follows:

Every Christian is a Catholic except those who believe that their denomination has a monopoly. If we be looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our Faith, as it says, we will all be looking at the right direction, the right leader, who needs no vicar, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

The authority of Christ is not at this time a political one – the devil has the lease on the politics of this world and its nation states for now, so Churches in all cases should be separate from states.

Like this:

Logo of the anti-RFID campaign by German privacy group FoeBuD. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve just finished watching the main Polish news programme of the day, the evening “Wiadomosci” programme on TVP1, which had as its closing story information about how in Poznan there has been a blitz on people who have dogs and haven’t paid their dog tax. Dog tax is a local tax in Poland, some municipalities charge it and some don’t, and there is a degree of freedom as to how much can be charged, and in Poznan that amount is 55 PLN/year, which is about $16 a year. This is more than I can remember from the UK, but dog tax was abolished there many years ago. During my childhood the amount was a good deal less than that, but maybe comparable if you account for inflation.

The question asked, and answered, in the news broadcast, was how the authorities knew where these dog owners were in order to charge them and take them to court for their missing payments of dog tax. The answer is, some time ago the municipality had a free chipping exercise for dogs whereby owners were given a free ID chip so that their dog could be returned to them in the event of loss. This you can have from any vet, by the way, but then it is a paid service. Not thinking that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and taking this inexplicable magnanimity on the part of the City at face value, Poznan citizens queued up and took part in the action and had their free ID chips with their addresses and telephone numbers, which of course were all put in a big database and reported to the City. The news report didn’t go into detail as to whether these people had signed anything which allowed that to happen or whether it was simply an abuse of privacy and a breach of the Data Protection Law, but when has that ever bothered government anyhow? It’s the little man with his business that has to worry about that, and not the governing elites.

Anyway, the next thing they said is that a number of Polish cities which did not have dog tax before are about to introduce it, citing Krakow as an example. They then also featured a few seconds of a disgruntled dog owner saying how he found it unfair that taxes apply to dogs but not to cats, guinea pigs, or aquarium fishes. I am sure he was about to use the word “”racism” had they only given him time to do it. Read the rest of this entry →

I want to ask you about something, if you are healthy enough to answer. What does Psalm 82:6 mean? Of course, this is connected to John 10:34 as well. And on the same topic, who are the “sons of God” in Genesis and Job?

This topic may look like one topic, in a sense there is an element of being related, but in fact I would regard these as two separate issues. Let’s deal first with the issue of Psalm 82:6 and John 10:34.

Psalm 82 says the following:

82.1 God standeth in the congregation of the mighty, he judgeth among the gods

At first glance, this looks not dissimilar to other passages, as you say in the start of Job is a good example, where God is talking among the angelic host. But see what he says in the next verse:

82.2 How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked?

This puts an entirely different slant on it, as we see no cases of angels being given judgement of men. Instead, we are told that we shall judge angels (1 Cor 6.3). This certainly puts human judges on a higher line towards God almighty than the angels themselves, but surely that cannot mean any humans, this may be referring to the elect, or to people within the elect that had been given certain priviledges or responsibilities to represent God in the earth. Let’s see what further light we can find as we read on: Read the rest of this entry →

On the Origins of Language Species(or: “We don’t know what’s right, except that the Bible‘s account of language origins must be wrong!”)

Way back over eight years ago now, on 26th January 2004, I wrote this article in talk.origins, free.christians and alt.fan.uncle-davey which kicked off no little furore, and got me labelled by Aaron Clausen, a talk.origins regular, as a “science-fiction writer” and “the most dangerous and mischievous kind of Creationist“. He called my account “nothing more than a piece of fiction. It’s like good science fiction, it weaves fact and fiction together in such a way as the improbable seems no more surprising than the probable.” He also wrote on 2nd February 2004 “To my mind, Davey, you are the most mischievous and dangerous kind of Creationist. … You even know the holes in the knowledge of the study of language, and you can use the terminology to great effect. People … seeing your essay, would likely fall for it hook, line and sinker. Because it mixes fact and myth so very well, you give it an air of plausibility.” That was in amongst admitting that he didn’t know any better answer to the origin of language families, and when I asked him what he would tell his kids on the subject if they asked him whether there was a polygenesis of language families or linguistic monogenesis, (this being the sort of thing they ask at the breakfast table in American skeptics’ households) he said he would tell them “we don’t know“.

It seems like even no explanation at all is better for these “knowledge-thirsty” evolutionists than the Bible’s one, if and whenever the Bible invokes supernatural intervention by God, as at Babel. And their counter to the perfectly reasonable claim, (straight out of atheist Conan Doyle, by the way) that if you cannot disprove a theory it must be true, is that that’s the ‘goddidit’ argument, also known as the “God of the gaps” argument. They think that by giving silly, mocking designations to the perfectly logical and consistent lines of thought that Christians have, they have somehow effectively dealt with them. Either that or they make out that the questions which we raise are invalid in some way. In all they do they are like lawyers who, having trouble with the evidence, use odd points of law to attack the procedure, so that justice and fairness and true rationale flee out of the window, pursued by the harrying hounds of unscrupulous rhetoric.

Obviously, I’m not out to deceive anybody or produce fiction or stir up mischief as Aaron Clausen claimed, but I really think that if someone knows the facts about where we are in the reconstruction of earlier languages, and doesn’t have a world view that excludes a priori the chance for God to work directly on the human mind, en masse, they will say that the explanation I gave, based on the Babel account of scripture, is just as valid an account of how we got to today’s languages as any other. Only prejudice against the possibility of such action by God is a reason not to acknowledge that I have offered a workable and valid theory, and one that reflects observable fact more clearly than such theories as would dovetail well with evolutionary views of the origin of man.

Anyway, the person who got me started is ‘Sloggoth’ and he/she is in the quotes.

Some of the following is quoted from the time, and some has been added since to improve the communication of the ideas.

Well, Uncle Davey, you’ve confused a lurker pretty well here. If youwould be so kind as to clarify:When you speak of linguistic evolution do you mean: 1) The evolution of the *capacity for language* in humans? Biologicalevolution must indeed be able to explain this.or 2) What everyone else means, i.e. change in language, such as thatwhich produced French and Spanish from Latin? There is no reason why a theory which deals with genetic change should address a purelycultural phenomenon, beyond explaining how it is biologically possible in the first place.or even 3) If one cannot trace linguistic evolution beyond the known families, (which probably arose at some time in the past that could very loosely fit the Babel account), then the Babel account is thereby not contradicted?

The way I see it is that what happened at Babel everyone received their own language. Evenhusbands and wives could not talk and little kids could not communicate withtheir parents. This meant that in order to have an established familylanguage, families needed to isolate themselves, and then they would alllearn the language of the mother of that family, as mothers are and alwayshave been the main one to teach the little children language. The mentherefore would also have needed to take their wive’s grammar and syntax, but the wife would in return take a lot of the lexicon from her husband, andin the process already the family language would become at oncegrammatically simpler but also lexically richer than the Babel exitlanguages each member spoke. We have the expression ‘mother tongue’ in almost every language but Welsh, which is like the exception that proves therule, exactly from this time, which was only one generation in the historyof man.

That’s right. There was only one generation from Babel in which individual languages became family languages. The majority of the languages that came out from Babel would have gone into disremembrance when that person dies. In some cases the vocabulary will have been loaned into the family language, and in most cases the phonetics will have influenced to some degree the family language. People who had no families and no successors therefore had their individual languages vanish probably without trace.

You see, this was the mechanism that would have driven people out of Babel into theirown place, so that they could quietly re- establish a common language withthose who meant most to them, their family, without linguistic interference from all the others who would come babbling over the horizon, preventingtheir children from achieving any linguistic competence.

Within a further forty years, that one language per family (already maybe only one fifth of thenumber actually made at Babel) was similar conflating and merging intotribal languages. The basic model would then be the family language of the most dominant family in the tribe. This process took longer than the family language process, as the new languages were being learned as foreignlanguages by all in the tribe but the dominant family. These dominantfamilies are the ancestors of the aristocratic families that grew up laterin almost every culture.

The tribal languages would have taken over from the family languages so thatby about four hundred years after Babel the single family language was asredundant and extinct as the single person language had been forty yearsafter the Babel event. But each of these tribal languages would have been a selection of grammars, phonologies and lexical materials that came out of the Babel event. We are told in scripture that God confused the language, which may suggest that he took things which were already in the Adamic language and mixed them up. However, my personal belief is that none of the exit languages had all of the material that was in the Adamic language. When given directly to Adam by God, this language was a perfect thought vehicle for the man that He had made, and to be able to be taught and used by future generations. In Isaiah 65v20 as well as in the early Genesis chapters we see indications that the original plan for the length of human childhood was 100 years, setting up for a lifetime of up to 1000 years. Up to the Flood we see nobody doing any “begetting” until they are over one hundred, that’s for sure. The language given by God originally would have been a rich language taking the full measure of 100 years to acquire from parents and enabling thought and worship on a level unparalleled by people living today. Because there were relatively few of them and the Flood was such a huge cataclysm, we cannot see any indications of the achievements they had made with this linguistic tool, but they must have been amazing.

Once we arrive at post-Flood times and you see in scripture the lives of post-Flood generations going down to below what would have counted as infant mortality before the Flood, people maturing already in the second decade of their lives and then expected to have finished their educations (one of the reasons why there is this conundrum that we barely use a fraction of our brains’ synaptic capabilities – they are still the same size as those brains were which held Adamic, but now our childhoods are too short to learn it properly anyway) so the Adamic language was probably already deteriorating – probably people started to use a debased, pidgin version of the old language at Babel, although as a Community they may still have possessed the totality of it.

So the size of the confounded languages were probably much smaller – it’s reasonable to suggest about 20% of the complexity and richness of the original Adamic language. Each individual language probably held a unique mix and match combination of about 20% of what was in Adamic, but shifted and confused so that Adamic could not be put back together again.

And of such languages, getting back to the story, tribal languages emerge within up to 400 years and we come to the rise of the supertribal language.

Some of these early tribal languages exist until today. Basque is a good example. It isn’t visibly related to other languages around it, it has simply been there, carried in a small tribe in enveloped in the Pyrenees, for thousands of years.

Other tribes conflated again into the supertribe, and the supertribe is where we find the original languages at the heads of the family trees thatwe can easily recognise. The Aryan supertribe spoke a language whose name wedon’t know, but we know it must have existed and we call it Proto-Indo-European. They themsleves could have called itYaspriyakis, Blurbnurb or something like that, or just “Smith’s Tongue”, for all we know. It was a supertribe,and as with all supertribes, it fell apart, with people who spoke it leaving and mingling with the languages of the substrate where they went, which weregenerally tribal, not supertribal peoples, and could not compete with them.

So we have a tendency for common grammatical elements to be seen, but a lot of different lexical stock from the borrowings. Even the supertribe itselfhad not been stable long when the emigrations started; some thought the wordfor ‘a hundred’ should be ‘kentum’ and others thought it should be ‘sati’.About all they could really agree on was the words for beech trees, snow,and about twenty other matters.

So the supertribal language was the turning point. From Babel to the supertribal period, maybe a hundred thousand languages got down to maybe ten thousand.After that time the supertribal languages started to have multipledescendents, and even some descendents had multiple descendents themselves,so that they replaced the exit languages being spoken by peoples like the pre-Celtic cultures of Ireland, and then many of those languages, like IrishCeltic, themselves became forced into a minor role or often made extinctaltogether, like Cornish, by more vigorous languages of their distantcousins, such as English.

In sum, if we have had six thousand years since Babel, one of those thousand has seen the rise of the linguistic supertribe, and the other five thousand has seen mainly supertribal languages disintegrating into the language families we know today (and others which have gone extinct with no trace). In some parts of the world smaller languages, even ones that have resulted from supertribal disintegration, have started to grow again into supertribal languages, so the whole ebb and flow described here is something which didn’t necessarily happen just once in that length of history.

Incidently, even broader groups than Nostratic have been proposed,including attempts to reconstruct words of Proto-World. Unfortunately the only one I recall at the moment is rather indelicate.

There’s every chance that we can guess at a word that was in the vocabularyof somebody who walked out of Babel, maybe in a sound-shifted or abbreviatedform. After all, all the material in every tribal or supertribal languagecame from someone or other’s Babel exit language. It’s not common forlanguages to invent words, so even ‘shit’ has good cognates in Greek. If wesay that ‘skata’ is closer to the Babel exit languages, because we can tell it didn’t go through theGermanic sound shifts which we know all about thanks to the Brothers Grimm, then we canassert with a good probability of truth that some rather powerful man or hiswife, with a penchant for talking about his or her bodily functions,received the ancestor word for ‘skata/shit’ in his or her personal languageat Babel. It is very interesting how reluctant mankind is to introduce linguistuc material out of nothing. Almost everything is a loanword or a calque or an omatopoeia, or a contraction of other words. Even on the internet existing language was massaged to create the terms we are now using worldwide over the last 25 years. Very little by way of truly random words have been used. Even the search engine “Google”‘ links from “go ogle” and “Facebook” comes from two very basic monosyllablic English words.

Anyway, this account, which has no shortage of fantasy in it as I am more than aware, and make no apology for in the face of the fantasy required to make a dinosaur drawing complete with colours and habits from a couple of bones, this being the sort of trick on which most people’s understanding of evolution seems to base, is consistent nevertheless with both on the one hand theobservable fact that we cannot get back any further than PIE or PFU, andfind further common ancestors, obviates the absurd and counter-intuitivenotion that language systems fairly equal in complexity could have evolvedin the human race at different times and places, but without the organs ofspeech of the races then changing so that an infant could not acquire aperfect accent in a non related system, and where we do not see easiergrammars compounding into harder grammars, but rather the reverse, and onethe other hand it is consistent with what scripture says about languageorigins.

And so, in conclusion, evolutionary science is at odds with what is known ofphilology, and the Bible is not.

By the way, in the rest of the original talk.origins discussion, it became apparent that the evolutionists have nothing to offer but rhetoric, and try to divert the uncomfortable topic onto archaeology, where they attempted to argue from negatives assuming that Babel hinges on the archaeological work of Babylon, when there is no reason at all to expect to find any traces of Babel and its tower. However large it was, it was doubtless less in terms of mass of fabric than the Berlin Wall was, and people recycled that in the space of a few months, let alone a few thousand years. If anything has changed, and any evolutionist has something to offer which is new, please go ahead and make your comments.

I remind evolutionists reading this article of their right of immediate and public reply on the bulletin board of this site, which as I said earlier is not edited or moderated except for things that are illegal and for spam.

I hope Christians are encouraged by all this not to believe that science has all the answers, it doesn’t. But as we see evolutionists, especially those who are only using the evolutionary fallacy as their charter for atheism or apostasy, will fill in the gaps between real science and their world view and then try to convince us that this philosophical putty of theirs is good science too.

(DJJ, based on material added to the old site usenetposts.com 29/4/04, original debate from Jan-Feb 2004, now with 25% added material)

I was asked in private mail in YouTube this week if I am a cessationist when it comes to the Charismata, or spiritual gifts such as glossolalia, healings, prophesyings, etc, as outlined in parts of the New Testament. A cessationist would argue that these gifts were for a certain period and then were withdrawn.

I am not sure I would say that I entirely am a cessationist, in that I believe in the sovereignty of God at all times and that God is able to make people speak in tongues or be healed today just as much as He was in apostolic times. The fact however remains that God does not always deal with His people in the same way at all times. When the people of God were led through the wilderness, God led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He gave them manna and quails to eat. When they arrived at the promised land there was no pillar of cloud, no pillar of fire, no manna and no quails unless people went and hunted for quails in the way they would today. So are we cessationist about the pillar of cloud? It’s a mere question of fact that it did indeed cease once it was no longer required and the Bible makes no attempt to cover that up. Therefore we see that particular miracles accompany particular historic events.
Once we entered into the fourth century and the Church was broadly established throughout the Roman Empire and beyond and gaining in popularity, the force of faith and the Gospel only were God’s will to carry the message forward. We don’t see much of the Apostolic Charismata applying to that period. Maybe that’s because they were no longer needed, and maybe they were only withdrawn because the Church sold out at that time to venality and carnal worliness, putting political power and Satan’s agenda before the claims of Christ and the Gospel for 1260 years, as prophesied in the Book of Daniel.

From the time of Constantine until Napoleon the true Church was engulfed by a political Church infiltrated heavily by Satan which nevertheless had many fine believers in it, and during the Reformation amazing things happened all by force of faith without much in the way of accompanying miracles or a charismatic movement.

Believers were put to death by the Roman false church in vast numbers for their proper Biblical faith, and yet none of this was accompanied by the outpourings which accompanied the Charismatic Revival.

After Napoleon, the way the battle worked changed a lot. Now the major seat of Satan was not the Holy Roman Empire invested in the Catholic Church anymore – Napoleon took back that political worldly role of the Catholic Church and handed it over to the New World Order – nation states in the main run by Freemasons and given the semblance of democracies even though their real nature was to enslave men and women as never before. From Bonaparte until the beginning of Tribulation we can trace this penultimate period of human history.

This modern period is hallmarked by the following:

1. Unparalleled numbers of people living on the planet, in fact probably over 90% of people who ever lived have had part of their lives in this period.
2. The sharp rise of secularism and the ubiquitous acceptance of the theory of evolution, and other connecting ideas all serving to undermine the view of a Creator.
3. Unheard of technologies enabling a free market of ideas and debate
4. A situation where those who believe the Gospel are able to communicate more easily than ever before with the world, so that now the Gospel has virtually been made available to every tribe and nation
5. Israel has been restored to something like its original place.
6. The world has increasingly crystallised into three camps, Gog and Magog (China and her allies vs America and the EU and other allies) and Ishmael (Islam) in between.
7. Christianity has splintered into more denominations than ever before and there are an equally large number of counterfeit sects which try to look like Christian denominations.
In the middle of this period the Charismata started to be an issue, with some people needing this boost to their faith rather than the pure faith arguments of the Reformation period. However there is little to compare the work of the Church in this period than in the pre-Constantine period.
At the same time Pentecostalist believers have contained a number of fine Christians who have done great things for the Kingdom. One only needs to look at the amazing growth of the Gospel in China to see their crowning achievement. They have also spawned more than their fair share of weirdos, charlatans and sects. That may not be a damning indictment as we know that the closer any group of believers is to being on the ball and really making an impact, the more Satan will attack that group, and deflecting onto additional revelations, wierd doctrines, venal practices and political divisions are all weapons in his armoury against Churches that make a difference. So-called Churches than make no impact for the Gospel are, on the other hand, largely left to get on with it or actively assisted by the evil one.

“By their fruits ye shall know them” says the Lord. This doesn’t mean that the evidence of satanic attack on part of Christianity should be regarded as bad fruit. The healthiest fruit is the most attractive for worms. The question is, what is the underlying fruit that is being attacked by the worms? Is it spiritual fruit, or spiritual gifts without real spiritual fruit?

I still say that the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, etc, as set out in Scripture should be any Christian’s priority. If a person can demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit, then nobody should dare deny that persons Baptism in the Holy Spirit. It should be clear enough – how can a person who demonstrates the fruit of the spirit not be with the Holy Spirit? How can a person say they have had the Baptism in the Holy Spirit if they have not the fruits of the Spirit, even when months or years have gone by since they claimed such a Baptism? If a person lacks the fruit of the Spirit but seeks to make up the lack of them by fooling others and primarily themselves into thinking that they can speak with tongues of angels, then I’m sorry, but they need to do a heart audit and think again.

Nevertheless, a time is no doubt coming when the Spirit will be poured out again as at Pentecost. Joel 2.28 and Acts 2.17 which quotes it talks about this outpouring of the Spirit. “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” and therefore Joel is likened to what is happening in Acts. However the following verses go on to outline the end of the world scenario, which we now know did not happen in the first few hundred years after the Death and Resurrection of our Lord, although disciples at the time expected it, and were intended to expect it.

I see a lot of the outpouring in Acts and which is in evidence in the Churches to whom Paul writes his Epistles as being a help in Evangelisation – and it surely was as people understood these languages as if they were being spoken to in their own languages. (This of course is not the case in most Pentecostal and other Evangelical churches today – the fact above all other I dare suggest, that leads to many serious-minded Christians who came to faith in Pentecostalism gradually transferring to other churches instead, which happens a lot.) But I also beyond that see them as a renewal of the Joel prophesy, a reminder and more information for us as to what will happen in the last days. I do like what the authors of the Left Behind books have made of the Tongues issue and other spiritual gifts – they show them as being revised in the last days and that is expressis verbis told to us in Acts 2.17ff and the Joel passage. They clearly refer to the end-times period. This is a period which has not started yet, but since all the pre-requisites for the starting of this period are now pretty much in place, and the pace of preparation of the coming Antichrist in this world is is palpably quickening from one week’s end to the next at this time, we can say with confidence that this is the penultimate period, and it is not long now before you really will see New Testament style miracles, unless of course the Church is first raptured in which case it will be only those coming to faith who were left behind who will witness them. And since I think that this planet has not seen the last of the true miraculous charismata, I can’t really call myself a cessationist.

However I do call myself a person who urges faith without the need for miracles, discretion in how we publish abroad the miracles which God does give us (the better we keep these secrets the more we will have of them, as it’s God’s will still for this time that the preaching of the Gospel not be accompanied by miracles in the main, but that He himself grants the holy gift of faith by the pure preaching of the word, nevertheless He is very merciful in alleviating the distresses of believers and answering prayers for them that have understanding…) and most of all in examining ourselves first and foremost for Spiritual fruit, and only after a satisfactory answer to that question (a rare event anyway) to worry about the advanced issue of Spiritual gifts.

I was discussing Genesis on Linked-In‘s Christian Professionals Worldwide Group, although I have stopped it and left the Group as some of my posts which had taken time to prepare were deleted without prior warning by the Moderators, which is not the way I care to engage in debate.

That is absolutely no reflection on the Brother who wrote privately to me with a discussion about Answers In Genesis. When I wrote the big piece below it would not pass through the Linked In private message limit, so I decided to place it here so as to share the thoughts here with my dear readers as well as be able to answer this Brother in full. I will call him Brother in Arizona unless he asks me to identify him. He’s not obliged to as he came in private correspondence, and in order to share the good discussion his note provoked, I will at least keep him anonymous unless he should choose otherwise, in which case I can always edit it and identify him if he prefers it.

The first note this Brother sent was

Hello David, it’s ****** here!

Thought I’d reply personally and privately on your previous post.

Sorry, but I couldn’t disagree with you any more on the subject of Ken Ham and his organizations. I believe he has a heart for God, but also believe he is guilty of bending the evidence to fit his theories. Frankly, I think he does more harm than good to the rational defence of Christianity. We’ve met; he registers high on my “kook meter.”

But, then again, I might register high on your kook scale, too!

Blessings to you,

(Brother in Arizona)

I wrote the following non-commital reply:

The evidence is the same for us and for the evolutionists, it is all down to interpretation.

Either you believe one interpretation, or the other. Simple as that.

His response was then a bit more detailed as to what bothers him about Ken Ham’s approach

Right you are, Davey!

Part of what I don’t appreciate about Ham’s approach in explaining the apparent age of the universe is his assertion that God created a “mature” universe, just like he created a mature Adam & Eve. Seems to me that it’s accusing God of fooling us; giving the apparence of an old earth when it’s really young. Why would He do that? Isn’t it more likely that we misunderstood the scriptures? We might also misunderstand the science, but there are many different disciplines, all agreeing on an old earth & universe.

As Christians, I think we fall right into our enemy’s plan when we spend so much time arguing on what six days means. Instead, I believe we should unite and call attention to all the problems with evolution. As more becomes known about biochemistry, Darwin’s ideas become increasingly suspect. The Darwinists are a secular religion, and they’re on the run. They’ve been spinning the evidence lately in creative ways, in order to support their theories. Which is exactly what I think Ken Ham does.

I have no problem believing in an ancient earth/universe; where “time” was not so important as the phases of creation. God created each species distinctly; they have adapted over time, but not changed from one species to another. The tide of scientific evidence increasingly is suggesting Intelligent Design and ancient earth. Always believed in the former, but was surprised when I reconsidered the latter.

Really glad our salvation hangs on none of this! And grateful that we can reason with one another. We may not persuade the other, but the discussion brings more clarity to both views. A radio-mentor of mine likes to say, “I prefer clarity to agreement.”

Blessings to you, Davey, and may God continue to bless us both with more clarity!

Well, as you can imagine, this well-written and cogent message was worth a far more expansive response than my initial one, and so here is the long reply – which Linked-In’s system couldn’t take, and then I brought it here. At that point I also redacted it slightly for the blog readership, hence references to this blog inside it, which were put in at the end.

Dear Brother,

The objection that you have to the mature Earth approach is exactly that which most of the Christian community had to Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalism when he first expounded it. In the end Gosse became ostracised – even from his own family – for proposing a God who “deceives” us with fossils, etc. They all said that a God who would hide Himself as implicit in Omphalism or Gosseism, as they put it, was immoral, despite the fact that Scripture itself warns that God sends “strong delusion” that peopl should love and believe a lie. He also hardens the heart of Pharaoh and of others, or blinds their eyes. It is in His sovereignty – He is Potter, we the clay. many people don’t like the idea of that and see themselves as Potter (or Weasley, or Grainger, depending on taste) and God they see as the clay, to be moulded as suits their philosophical fancy.

Personally, I think P. H. Gosse had it basically right and Ham has it basically right, and I’d like to tell you why.

When God made the world already old and put an already mature man and woman in it (he didn’t make them as babies) even having navels although they were not born (omphalos means ‘navel’ hence the term ‘omphalism’ for a world created as if it had been there a long time before), they both knew very well that they were made from the dust. They themselves had no childhood memories, they had language implanted and didn’t remember learning the words from their parents as we do and they were aware that there had been no-one but them at the beginning, they had spoken with God personally.

They lived for 900 plus years and will have told their story to hundreds of thousands of people – their children, grandchildren and great great great great great great grandchildren – all the people who lived then. And nevertheless people ignored God because they hadn’t seen him for themselves. Faith is ordained to come by hearing, and not by sight, and salvation is by faith – so God made it right from the beginning that men and women could come to faith by hearing or could choose to reinterpret what they saw around them in a different way.

After God destroyed the earth by a Flood and personally spoke to Moses afterwards and said “go forth and multiply”, his sons and their families knew without the need for faith from hearing (they had had their chance to be faithful prior to the Flood and had already passed that test) that God had acted in an almighty intervening way, and certainly was who he said he was. But within about 6 or 7 generations you have people already largely ignoring what they heard passed down about that from generation to generation and would have been going “Flood? what Flood? it’s impossible! They must have simply had a local Flood and exaggerated it”.

You can see where this is going; the same story at Babel where everyone alive experiences the breaking of language. The same at Peleg with the splitting of the continents, the same with the people of Israel at the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of fire and smoke and the manna in the wilderness. It happens again and again in the Bible. God intervenes and everyone knows – without the need for Faith that comes by hearing, that He is who He says He is. But afterwards those who didn’t see it with their own eyes are supposed to believe what they have heard, without seeing.

In order for them to have the ability to accept God in Faith there has to be a credible alternative. If there is nothing that makes any kind of sense but to believe in God then the only way to test people’s faith is to put them through trials, as we see in Job. But God is merciful and gentle, and instead of putting humanity through such trials as Job had on the basis of every person, He makes the test for most of the people who have ever lived (the vast majority of which are in the post-Darwinian period and who have to choose between a secular and a God-centred world view when the ‘scientific’ consensus is supporting a secular view) in that faith in God as Creator is not obvious. It becomes quite a leap of faith to believe in what God tells us in His word about Creation when we are bombarded with apparently clever people bringing what looks like evidence that the universe could have made itself impersonally.

God has hidden Himself from plain sight so that He can address the hearts of men and women and call them to Christ by faith, the faith that comes by hearing and the word of God as it says. The billions of years that it would have taken a world like this to evolve without almighty Divine agency (which actually are not enough, if you look at what is actually involved in the process of abiogenesis the chances of which happening alone are vanishingly small and the world is not big enough, nor even the universe, and ten times the time they think there was since the Big Bang – which regularly gets revised anyway – for the mathematics that are invoved just to get the necessary group of proteins together to produce the simplest viable life and get the chain of evolution started), those years are only notional. God tells us that He did it for us, and therefore there was really no need to hang around for all that time. God was able to make the light from stars millions of light years away hit the maturely created Earth and at the same time the star itself may already have had its supernova, but the light from that is still on its way. God made it this way and pretty much tells us that’s how he did it. And He will do it again for the new heavens and earth, and we won’t have to wait around for billions of years for that to appear either, although when it does appear it will be perfect and mature.

I agree with you that Creationism is not a Doctrine critical for salvation, but if someone rejects the idea of God’s intervening might in Creation, why would they not have the same doubts about God’s intervening might for the Resurrection world, the new heavens and earth? And if we don’t have the Resurrection, we are, as Paul says, of ‘all men most miserable’. That’s why I worry for non-Creationist Christians. I don’t want them to discover one day that they lack the faith to carry on, and give up in depression and misery. Which does in fact happen. I’m certainly not judging them. I would believe the same if God had not kindly opened my undeserving and unworthy eyes to His full power and creative glory.

Eyewitnesses of God’s miracles passed it to those in their family and friends, but it was rejected against the alternative that sight offered and men preferred to believe, but God
has always given us alternatives. We have been put here to believe, most especially in Christ, but in Him as both Redeemer and Creator. First God is interested in whether we will come to Him in Faith about what He has handed down to us by hearing (which includes reading) rather than the empirical “evidence” of sight, and experiment. And once we have faith, then God will test that Faith. People get trials for their faith on an almost daily basis, but thanks to the prevalence of the theory of evolution, some of these trials merely involve enduring the mockery of the world, although the Theory of Evolution inspired both Nazism and Communism, which have offered Christians far more serious trials.

Creationism is very often not served by some of the people who propound it, but AiG is, in my view, one of the better ones out there. That’s why I have their RSS feed continually on the side bar of this blog, and I pray that God blesses that and that these meagre efforts of mine might point some people there to have their preconceptions about the Origin challenged.

I want to leave you with one image – the place were Jesus shows us exactly how He did it. The wedding at Cana. That was Jesus first miracle in His earthly ministry, and so naturally we could even almost expect it to be a reflection of His initial work in creating the earth. When he turns the water into wine at Cana he doesn’t make new wine – he makes mature, vintage wine, which the guests then accuse the bridegroom of leaving the best till last when everyone knows that you put the best wine on the table first so that it can be appreciated while the guests are still fresh. You put the non-mature wines out afterwards, when the guests are, well if not tipsy then at least sated and their taste buds are less fussy. Such received wisdom existed at the time, as we see from the account in the economy of words that are used there. But the detail has much meaning – we are being shown that when Jesus for His first miracle, His Creation-reflecting miracle, changed water into wine He produced mature wine and not new wine. He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

God bless,

Davey

Should anyone be remotely interested there is a lot of newsgroup material from talk.origins group in which I talk about Omphalism and my own take on it, which I called “Omphalism-Lite”. The idea of Omphalism-Lite ties into my views on memory and its importance and centrality to language and thought, and therefore Omphalism Lite posits that God did not place as mature in this world anything involving human memory, including collective memories such as cultural artefacts.

Fossils I said may largely have resulted from the two large scale events, namely the Flood and the Dividing of Continents. First I thought that these were parts of one event and later on I started to think that the Flood and the Dividing of Continents were in different times. These days I don’t really have a problem with the fossils even being an “omphalos” under Omphalism Lite, because they are not a human cultural memory but a geological memory, which is perfectly entitled to reflect notional time.

In any event, if my take on the subject has interested you, googling on “Omphalism Lite” should give you more.